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Saturday, March 22, 2008

OAI4J Open Source Client Library Supports OAI Metadata Specifications

Software developers at the National Library of Sweden have announced the
release of OAI4J, a client library for OAI-PMH and OAI-ORE written in
Java, as Open Source. The project is hosted on SourceForge. OAI-PMH
(The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) provides
an application-independent interoperability framework based on metadata
harvesting, where a "record" is returned in an XML-encoded byte stream
in response to an OAI-PMH request for metadata from an item. Object Reuse
and Exchange (OAI-ORE) specifications allow distributed repositories to
exchange information about their constituent digital objects. These
specifications include approaches for representing digital objects and
repository services that facilitate access and ingest of these
representations. OAI4J has been released as Open Source under the Apache
License, version 2.0. Features for OAI-PMH: (1) convenient Java API that
lets you perform queries and handle the harvested data in an
object-oriented fashion; (2) it handles all the verbs and responses of
OAI-PMH. The OAI-ORE support: (3) lets you create and build Resource
Maps from scratch programmatically; (4) handles parsing of existing
Resource Maps written as Atom feeds; (5) allows Resource Map objects to
be serialized into Atom feeds; (6) can be extended to also handle RDF/XML
parsing/serialization. The SourceForge download site provides links for
a binary download, Java documentation for the API, and some examples to
get you started.

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